Nancy H. Hornberger: Negotiating Methodological Rich Points in the Ethnography of Language Policy
Nancy H. Hornberger: Negotiating Methodological Rich Points in the Ethnography of Language Policy
Building on Agar’s (1996:26) notion of rich points as those times in ethnographic research when something happens that the ethnographer doesn’t understand, methodological rich points are by extension those points where our assumptions about the way research works and the conceptual tools we have for doing research are inadequate to understand the worlds we are researching. When we pay attention to those points and adjust our research practices accordingly, they become key opportunities to advance our research and our understandings.
Drawing on ethnographic research on bilingual intercultural education policy and practice in the Andes carried out by Indigenous students for their Master’s theses at the University of San Simón’s Program for Professional Development in Bilingual Intercultural Education for the Andean Region (PROEIB Andes) in Bolivia, Nancy Hornberger highlights methodological rich points as they emerge across language policy texts, discourses, and practices. Framing the methodological rich points in the context of basic questions of research methodology and ethics, she borrows as organizing rubric the paradigmatic heuristic for sociolinguistic analysis first offered by Fishman (1971:219) and here adapted to the ethnography of language policy to ask: who researches whom and what, where, how, and why?
Professor Hornberger is Chair of Educational Linguistics in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Hornberger is internationally known for her work in bilingualism and biliteracy, ethnography and language policy, and indigenous language revitalization. She researches, lectures, teaches, and consults on multilingual education policy and practice in the United States, the Andes (Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador), Brazil, China, Singapore, South Africa, and other parts of the world.
Everybody is welcome. No registration.
Further information about the lecture: Margrethe Mondahl, dl.ibc@cbs.dk